Cabin
Fever's central motif is that of blood, and it's a powerful symbol in
today's world in which that fluid carries across with it ideas of disease and
death instead of life. There's
something horrifying in the way blood paints the walls of the central cabin,
signifying that death has taken over the location, and the interior of the
heroes' truck, indicating that there is no escape. There's also the titular condition, which evokes, by its definition, a
severe paranoia—in this case, specifically, of disease and death. These characters are scared of and to death, and they will do anything to
escape. The redneck hicks, of
course, represent…I'm sorry; I
can't keep this up anymore. Who am I kidding? Cabin
Fever says nothing, even about these invented ideas. It's a big tease from the moment the opening credits
end. This is the horror movie as farce. Take
note that I did not say satire or spoof. It's
an important point, because there is no lambasting or mockery of the genre
within its boundaries. First-time
director Eli Roth takes this material seriously, even in its ridiculous moments,
of which there are too many for anyone else to take the movie seriously.

Speaking of the opening
credits, they are the best thing in the movie. Set against an undistinguishable but disturbing background image with the
sound of flies growing louder and louder, the credits set up an atmosphere of
oncoming dread. Alas, then they end,
and people arrive on screen. A group
of stock college students arrive somewhere down in the old backwoods to stay for
a week in a cabin. There's
Paul (Rider Strong), the sexual predator disguised as a nice guy, Karen (Jordan
Ladd), the girl next door, Jeff (Joey Kern), the sissy, Marcy (Cerina Vincent),
the one who appears naked a lot, and Bert (James DeBello), the big, dumb jock
who thinks squirrels are "gay."Bert
stumbles across a walking, talking, rotting person dubbed only as "The
Hermit" (Arie Verveen). He
scares him away by shooting him and at him. Later, though, the wandering, mumbling, decomposing vagrant shows up at
the cabin wanting some help. When
they refuse him, he tries to steal their truck, which sends the kids—armed
with a gun, a baseball bat, a golf club, and a butcher knife—after him. They end up doing the humane thing by setting him on fire.

So the now immobile, mute,
burnt corpse of the recluse is in the reservoir that provides the drinking water
for the cabin, which means one by one the kids slowly succumb to the
flesh-eating disease. It may sound
intriguing, but the movie is about as scary as walking through a playground in
broad daylight but twice as funny. As
you can guess from the way they treat the desperate sick man, these guys freak
out quickly, which doesn't allow us time to get scared with them, and the inane
writing ensures that we don't get scared for them. First off, the dialogue contains such gems as, "That guy wanted our
help; we set him on fire!"That
line is, obviously, dreadful, and of all the possible nuances available for
saying that line, the actress fated to announce these now immortal words chooses
the worst possible reading. Another
tried and true clunker that makes an appearance here is "My God…They're all dead."If,
as a screenwriter, you find your fingers typing these words, it's time to just
give up for good. The acting doesn't
help in this case—or the rest of the movie, for that matter—either. It's not the endearing sort of badness we've come to expect from actors
in horror movies; instead, these kids think they're honing their naturalism.

Soon enough, however, the
disease strikes and there's lots of blood and gore. Look at all the gross stuff.
No,
seriously look at it. There's
rotting flesh and faces missing and dismembered body parts. It's just too bad it all looks completely
unconvincing. Equally unimpressive are the majority of actions taken by the
characters. Paul discovers the disease on Karen by sexually assaulting her, and later
when he's trying to find help, he ruins his chances by spying on a naked woman
in her home and subsequently being chased away by her husband. He does eventually get laid after Marcy compares their situation to
"being on a plane that you know is going to crash."I wonder if she speaks from firsthand experience. Now why she later thinks that the red marks on her back are from Paul
being a little too rough when everyone around her is contracting a flesh-eating
illness is unknown to me. Also
questionable to me is why she continues to shave her legs after losing large
chunks of skin in the process. Also
completely, utterly, hopelessly lost on me is the scene where the weird kid
outside the general store begins to shout "Pancakes!" and then
proceeds
to show off his martial arts skills in slow motion.

In
the movie's very few legitimately clever moments, you can almost hear Roth and
Pearlstein screaming from between the lines, "Look how clever this
is!"One character actually
points out that he survived over and over and over and over and over again, and
the only way to further telegraph what will happen next would be with subtitles.
The climax of Cabin Fever seems
to be heading in the direction of a predictable twist ending that never arrives
(maybe that's what was in the hillbilly's mysterious box). Instead, the whole movie seems to exist to be a variation on the usual
devious-backwoods-folk cliché, but Roth and Pearlstein don't even manage to
make their creepy backwoods characters creepy in the first place. The whole thing is really just a big waste of time.